


Who Needs You, I'd Like to Know?

by NothingEnough



Category: Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series
Genre: 1950s, Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Anal Sex, Angst, Awkward Conversations, Bisexual Female Character, Character In The Closet, Ethical Dilemmas, Fade to Black, Hand Jobs, Ill-advised Sexual Encounters, Lavender Scare, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, Oral Sex, Red Scare, Rimming, Secret Identities, Slurs, Swearing, Tags Are Hard, Unsafe Sex, mlm/wlw solidarity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-01 04:09:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13286688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingEnough/pseuds/NothingEnough
Summary: Or, the story of how Clark Kent repeatedly failed to realize Bruce Wayne was Batman, on account of being too easily distracted. Among other things.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoubtingRabbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubtingRabbit/gifts).



He suspected the moment they met. He shook Mr. Wayne's hand and thought _I know this heartbeat_ , a thought he dismissed as inconsequential. There were only so many configurations of a four-chambered muscle. He heard his mother's and father's hearts a thousand times a day, but that didn't mean they were nearby him in disguise. 

The moment the handshake ended, Clark melted into the crowd--or might as well have, given how carefully Wayne focused on Lane. Once, Bruce asked Lois in a c'mon-but-seriously tone why the Planet sent a jockey from the sports desk to a charity event across the state line.

 Lane smiled up at him and, her words ever so slightly clipped, said: "Kent's allergic to bullshit. If he sneezes, I know you're lying."

 Wayne glanced at Clark, his bland, Hollywooden features a picture of amiable stupidity. "That must be a terrible allergy to have in a room full of Gotham's best and brightest. Hope you brought your inhaler."

He laughed, and that was it for his first interaction with the infamous Mr. Wayne. He was there to verify Lane's version of events if any of Gotham's upper-crust contested her writeup. He listened, taking his own shorthanded notes, and followed after her once she moved on to another potential source. Towards the end of the night, he saw Bruce once more, when Wayne bid them both goodbye with a handshake.

If Clark had the senses of a typical human, he wouldn't have noticed the shift of displacement against his skin as Bruce tucked the small slip of paper into his shirt-cuff until later that night, when he removed his cufflinks.

Still, the neatness of the trick made him wonder. He waited until he and Lane were in their taxi, on the way to the hotel, before he retrieved it. It was a little name card--one side bore _Bruce Wayne_ in just the flush kind of script Clark expected. The other side read _104(115 + 87) x 2330(03 + 18) = ?_ , handwritten in black ink. Clark calculated the answer without thinking about it, but surely that wasn't the point here, there was some message he wasn't getting, and that made him remember the heartbeat. He wondered if he'd just spotted an ally or an enemy in their secret guise, if this wasn't some code meant to warn, or threaten, him.

He ground at it until they arrived at their hotel, and he was preparing to pretend to settle down in his own room (once he could hear Lois sleeping, he'd slip into the Superman guise and check Metropolis periodically) when it hit him. He'd brought his own alarm clock from home, and he glanced at it while brushing his teeth and was surprised that it was already 23:47, and he spat into the sink just like a normal person who wasn't an alien foundling, a person whose teeth might rot and needed brushing, and what if 2330 was a specific time?

Clark wiped his mouth--he was raised near a barn, not in one. Okay. Grinding his thoughts to a halt on a whimsy seemed preferable to feeling sorry for himself. Okay, so say it's a specific time. And the number attached to the time could be a date. The eighteenth was tomorrow. So the second half of the note was about 11:30 tomorrow night. The first half was, since he was playing a guessing game, a location, a place to go with the time. 115 and 87 could be cross-streets, not that Gotham was anywhere near as simple to navigate as Metropolis, and 104 could be a building number, or a suite number, and--

\-- _and I think Bruce Wayne just used code to ask me to visit a hotel room_ , Clark thought, watched himself turn bright red in the mirror, and he almost forgot that Bruce was supposed to be too stupid for such a clever trick.

***

He tried not to tell Lois, and ended up both blurting out the truth and showing Lois the name card as evidence. (Sometimes, he thought that if it weren’t for the glasses, everybody would know he was Superman within the week.) Ethically, he didn’t see a way out for himself. If he consented to the invitation, even if the visit were entirely professional, it would ruin his ability to write about Bruce Wayne, which meant that it did concern her.

Lane, who did in fact possess the allergy to bullshit she’d attributed to Clark, looked at the namecard, flipped it over, quirked her lips. “You’re a fucking idiot for doing anything with this other than grabbing the gossip pages.”

“Jeez,” he muttered, “this isn’t about a column. If--”

“Nope,” she said, holding the card up like a thin dagger before her face. “ _I'm_ talking right now, not you. Bruce Wayne wants you to meet him in a hotel room late at night. Either he’s not half the businessman his reputation suggests, and he’s planning on offering you a bribe in person; or he’s planning on sleeping with you, and he’s foolhardy to the point of criminality.” They both agreed on that. A guy who normally had two inches of Gotham newsprint a week dedicated to his sex life ought to not flirt with journalists.

“And yet it doesn’t even occur to you to get to the nearest typewriter and bang out a quick piece of rank speculation on Wayne’s sexual proclivities. Christ, you act like you’ve made an appointment, not gotten an invitation. I appreciate your willingness to confirm a story, or whatever the hell this is, but you don’t have to sleep with him, Kent. You do know that, right?”

"Sure,” he said, “I can not go.”

“You can--” Her eyes widened. She slightly crumpled the card between her fingertips. Clark waited, observed as the following thoughts struck Lois, each one telegraphed in her microexpressions: Clark wanted to, or wouldn’t mind if, end the night in Wayne’s bed, even if he got nothing out of it but the encounter itself. If Lois reported on something as touchy as Wayne’s sexual preferences, it might--despite her willingness to go to jail for a source--lead to Clark being outed. If that happened, everything he ever wrote or edited on Wayne would be double-checked. Including some of Lane’s reporting. More importantly, she’d inadvertently send one of her closest friends to prison, either for sodomy or for Communist decadence.

Lane finally pronounced her judgement. “You’re a selfish dick.”

“I’m sorry. Look, don’t use my notes from yesterday regarding Bruce. We’ll both feel less guilty.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.” She reached forward and neatly tucked the name card into his shirt pocket. “If he says anything about his recent political donations, you let me know, and I don’t give a damn how pretty his eyes are.”

***

By the time he arrived at the cross-streets and found that, yes, there was a hotel on the far corner, Clark was too nervous to suspect anybody but himself. Why was he doing this? This was stupid. Gotham wasn’t as safe as Metropolis for men like him, and he didn’t know for certain that this wasn’t a trap of some kind, and what the heck would he do if he didn’t get back home by tomorrow?

Bruce invited him in with the bloodshot eagerness of a one-whisky man in the middle of his third. He wasn’t drunk, Clark knew, who could tell at a glance or a breath, and Wayne smelled like precisely two ounces of single-malt and two gallons of stress hormones. So he wanted to appear drunk while still being able to recall what happened the next day. Also, he was terrified. That fear was so reasonable that it persuaded Clark to accept a drink.

He didn't throw all caution to the wind. In one microsecond, Clark began to raise his whisky tumbler to his lips; in the next, moving too fast for Bruce to presumably see, he searched the room for any sign of ill intent. As far as he could tell, Bruce only brought the clothes on his back, two different keyrings, fifty in cash, and a half-empty jar of Vaseline.

Clark very suddenly blushed between sips of this criminally expensive liquor.

When it was through, he looked through the bottom of the tumbler at the tops of his loafers. "D'you always ply the press like this, or am I not here professionally?"

He glanced at Wayne, and consciously took in everything about him. There was so much about him that didn't fit, a thousand tiny flaws which combined to give Clark one big sense of unease. He didn't exactly hobnob with billionaire industrialists, but he'd met a few in his time. Bruce was the only one he'd met whose movements told a long history of broken bones and repetitive stresses unrelated to pacing an office. His wide brown eyes remained the very picture of affluent emptiness as a smile borne of bone-dry humor drifted over his face. "Kent, I'm sure Miss Lane brought you to Gotham because you're smarter than that."

"Good gravy, why are you so surprised that I'd ask? It's not like I'm used to being, uh," 'Proposition' sounded too sordid.

"What, guys don't make passes at guys who wear glasses?" Wayne shrugged. "I figured that mutually assured destruction would cover me in this one instance."

"That assumes that both sides have the power to end the world," Clark said. "You've got nothing on me."

"I knew you'd say yes."

"I," and he stopped, because that dug deep into the very heart of his fear and almost killed it. He set down the tumbler on top of the bureau by the radio. "How'd you know?"

"The way you kept looking at me. I doubt anyone else noticed, since no one else was looking for it. But I was." Wayne nearly stumbled on the neat, thin carpet as he closed the distance between them, as Clark stood perfectly still and allowed him nearer. "Really, though, it's because you're a nice guy. I figured your sense of fair play would protect me. You wouldn't call the bulls on me because you wouldn't think it was right, or just, or whatever."

"You're gonna end up in jail."

"Or in a gutter." He shrugged as he said it, shrugged and one corner of his mouth just barely twitched in an expression mistakable for a smile.

He didn't move. He should leave, this was just _asking_ for trouble he didn't need, but. "It's not funny."

"No, it isn't," and it seemed almost criminal that Clark didn't know in that moment, didn't stumble into who else Wayne was even by accident, but then, Wayne fell on his knees in the next moment, then his hands spread over the tops of Clark's thighs, then his fingers picked open the button, then the zipper. "You worry too much."

"Oh, uh, that, wow," was what came out of Clark's mouth. He took a single step backwards and he ended up against the wall, Bruce's fingers hooking his belt-loops and easing his jeans down and out of the way. Then his drawers. Then Wayne leaned up and kissed him so firm and intimate that Clark could taste the back of his throat, he cried out and caught his hands in Bruce's hair, felt and heard a man he barely knew moan around him.

"--please--"

-tbc-


	2. Chapter 2

They saw each other five times in the next six months, each time in a different hotel in a different borough of Gotham, each time arranged by Bruce. The one exception was their next-to-last meeting--Wayne made an unannounced trip to Metropolis, supposedly to watch his ball team crash upon the unbreakable rocky shores of Metropolis’s winning streak.

White sent Clark to report on the game itself, and, after a protracted argument, agreed to let Lane be his plus-one. Clark barely listened to Perry and Lois debating the merits of her presence at the game; it didn’t matter. Lane wanted to be there because Wayne frequently surrounded himself with the cartoon characters she reported on in Politics. Plus, she probably suspected that Wayne was in town for something else. He almost never followed any of his teams on the road unless it coincided with some shindig announced a few days afterwards.

Kinda made Clark wonder if anybody was reporting on the game out of a desire to tell the folks at home who won.

He tracked Bruce down during the second inning; as they approached the owner’s box, Lane caught a good look at who else was in there. She crossed herself.

“You’re not even Catholic,” he said. “What’s the deal?”

“Try tearing your eyes away from God’s Gift, Kent.”

He rolled his eyes elaborately, as though he hadn’t been caught out, and obeyed. Right next to Bruce was Halliday. Nominally the representative of Metropolis’s District 81; around the _Planet_ , he was known as the honorable representative of LexCorp. To his left was Stoat, a lobbyist on loan from Florida, also in the pay of LexCorp. At his elbow pretending to simper was Vernon, she was a fixer of Roy Cohn’s moral character and charm, habitually employed by, you guessed it, give the man a cigar.

“Oh, Jeez Louise,” Clark said.

“What d’you think he’s in town for, Smallville?”

“Please. Enjoy this a little less.”

He tried--honestly, he spent so much time that evening trying _not_ to think of why Bruce was in town. He shook hands with Wayne (ignoring Lane as she suddenly dropped forty IQ points and introduced herself to Halliday as "Summer Gleeson, Gotham _Gazette_ "), made a little small talk about the season, requested an interview after the game, arranged to meet him at a restaurant about four blocks from Clark’s apartment. He managed it all without feeling that sick twist in his stomach at the thought of Bruce Wayne involved with Lex Luthor.

Despite the cool early-spring evening, Bruce was sweating bullets when they met at the Double L. Two beers and the feverishness wore off, but not the wild nervousness in Bruce’s otherwise-empty brown eyes, which had the watchful look of a man fantasizing of the nearest exit. Eventually, Clark’s heartachy compassion for Bruce having no clue how to behave on what amounted to a date outweighed his concerns about Wayne’s business dealings.

“Bruce, nobody’s going to recognize you here.”

“Bullshit. You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve been recognized. The last time I went to Spain, I found out that the falangistas all know who I am. That was--”

That was something he might have to tell Lois Lane. But: “Hate to tell you this, but you’ve been demoted. Around here, you’re not Bruce Wayne, international businessman and celebrity. You’re just the fellow Clark’s seeing right now.”

“... is this a--?”

“A fag bar?" Bruce flinched--ever so slightly, more than enough for Clark to notice--when he said the word _fag_. He felt this hard stab of guilt work into his chest. "Not this one, but this is that kind of neighborhood. And you don’t have to be afraid around here, is all I’m saying. The mob’s grip isn’t very strong because the cops don’t harass people here too often.”

“Why the hell don’t they?”

“Superman keeps an eye on this neighborhood.”

“He what?”

“He does that with a few of the more, uh, vulnerable populations in Metropolis,” said Clark, and talking about himself in the third person was the most normal thing he’d done so far tonight. “People who, well, are traditionally not able to trust the police.”

“Really.” Bruce’s gaze shifted from Clark’s face to some point past Clark’s shoulder. He tossed back the rest of his beer, opened his mouth to speak, and loudly hiccuped. He allowed Clark to laugh at him, smiling in something like drunken good humor, then said: “Maybe Superman’s homosexual.”

Clark smirked, as though folks in Metropolis discussed his sexual preferences on a regular basis, as though this conversation were in no way new to him. “Why’d you say that?”

“Because people like us end up in jail, or in the sanitarium,” said Bruce, still smiling distantly. “Maybe Superman just thinks the law’s unjust for his own reasons, or maybe he’s got a personal stake in how we’re treated legally.”

“I guess I never really thought about Superman like that.”

“This is a more innocent town, I guess. You wouldn’t believe the shit they say about Batman back home.”

He took Bruce home. Before he did, he had the presence of mind to excuse himself to the Double L’s washroom, then employed his super-speed to the incredibly selfish end of sneaking back to his apartment and tidying up. He couldn’t make the place anymore palatial, and it didn’t compare to a single one of the hotels Bruce had brought him to, and so he didn’t worry about it. For a few minutes, all he worried about was walking back to his place with a handsome guy on his arm.

He kept it together until they were in his bedroom--he did really well, honestly!--and he had Bruce backed up against the bed, his suit jacket lying dead on its back on the floor by the half-open door, Bruce’s top three shirt-buttons undone and Clark _just_ got his teeth against that bare neck and then, incredibly, Bruce said: “I can’t stay tonight.”

“But--”

“I’ve got a thing in the morning,” and there it was. Bruce’s hands settled warm over his chest, straining his shirt against its light-blue buttons and Clark felt... Nothing. A little repulsed, actually.

“That ‘thing’,” he said, half-smothered against Bruce’s neck. “That wouldn’t be a thing at Tilton Avenue, would it?”

A silence that said it all, really, still ended with: “Is this on the record?”

“Why would you even think of doing any kind of business with Lex Luthor!” He caught Bruce by the shoulders, resisted the temptation to give him a shake. “You can’t make a deal with him, he’ll just screw you over the first chance he gets, unless--are--?”

And it hit him. Finally. What he should have known all along couldn’t be ignored anymore. “Oh. I get it. I know who you are,” Clark said, took a single, cautious step backwards, fixed his fogged-up glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “You’re the Lex Luthor of Gotham.”

“... I try not to be.”

“See, but that’s just what you _would_ say,” and he didn’t like the whine in his own voice. His arms crossed over his chest, as though that would protect him from working out all the implications of Wayne being anything like Luthor. Gotham was the East Coast’s version of Dodge City, and how much of that had to do with the wheelings and dealings of Bruce Wayne?

Bruce sat down hard on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together under his chin. He looked like he was posing for a sculptor. _The Millionaire At Rest_. “You think poorly of me now.”

“Kind of. Yeah.”

“... fucking… fine.” His pale face disappeared behind his hands for a few moments. When it reappeared, everything--the high blush in his cheeks, the angry spark in his eye, any sign of actual emotion, all vanished. Clark found the effect unsettling.

“Gotham City has, on average, three times as much organized crime-related activities as any two cities of comparable size in the Union. Most of the mob activity is perfectly legal in city limits. Nothing gets done without one of about fifteen families approving it. And that’s just crime families--that’s not touching the slimy crap they get away with on the City Council, or the Mayor’s office, or every police station within fifty miles of city limits. I have two choices. I can sometimes do business with people I think are morally unsavory, and try to do some good with the profits, or I can remain morally pure and lose whatever social and financial influence I have. I choose to do business. You don’t have to like my choices, and I’d expect you to write about them as frankly as you would anybody else’s.”

“You’re not trying to tell me that you and LexCorp are going to build an orphanage.”

“I’ll have to direct all questions from the press to my lawyers.”

“You keep bringing it up, Wayne, and I’ll remember I’m supposed to be a member of the press.”

Bruce shrugged, the gesture small, inconsequential. “Go ahead. Guess I’d have to show my face to the HUAC eventually. May as well do it now.”

 _Swell_ . Now the stab of guilt felt more like a bomb, an almost-living thing capable of shredding anything in its wake. So far as he knew, Clark Kent wasn’t on the Committee's radar. But Superman was. Superman had himself a standing invitation to Just Show For An Interview and thereby Validate That The System Works. Superman hadn’t answered; he wasn’t convinced that particular part of the system _did_ work. If it did, then he was just the sort of provocateur the Committee was designed to catch, and he didn’t relish the potential ethics of choosing between leaving Metropolis unprotected, or ignoring his own conviction (and the legitimacy of the entire System, not just part of it).

Clark wouldn’t wish that on Lex Luthor. Even if it did put Luthor behind bars.

He sat down beside Bruce. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.”

“You’re goddamn right. What’s with this bit, anyhow? What’s it to you if I work with LexCorp? You’re not my lawyer, or my PR agent, or my CFO, or my butler. How is it you’d rather talk than fuck?”

“I like you and care about your well-being, you self-centered dope.”

“Then you should be working harder to make me want to stay the night, shouldn’t you?”

“... is that a thing I can do?”

“You can give it a shot.”

Clark didn’t strike a Lucky, but he gave it his level best.

He got the lights off and the blinds closed and his own clothes on the floor in short order. The setting made all the difference for him--he did sometimes have flings, but he only brought a fellow home if he was potential boyfriend material, and Clark had sky-high hopes for this. He wanted it to work and he wanted Bruce to be a nice guy who made bad choices out of bad circumstances, and that made forgiving Bruce easier.

He climbed into his bed and ended up on his side with Bruce pressed against him--Clark found where he left off, his left arm slipping under that surprisingly trim waist, his hand settling on the pronounced outline of Bruce’s cock with an assurance that verged on ownership. He grinned, he could hear Bruce trying valiantly to keep his voice down, holding his breath until he was certain he could exhale without screaming.

“Cut that out,” Clark breathed.

“... uh?”

“You can’t hear anything through these walls. Nobody lives downstairs and the guy who lives upstairs is a screamer. He owes me for all the times I haven’t banged on the ceiling and told him to shut up.” His other hand joined the first as he unzipped Bruce’s impeccably-tailored slacks. “Quit being so darn nervous and _be with me_.”

His hands clasped around Bruce’s arousal as though protecting it from the cold, then gave him one remorseless slow pump, paused, listened, gave him another. Around the third upstroke, a sound finally escaped from between Bruce’s grinding teeth, a soft moan and Clark giggled and moved a little faster, and there: for a few wild sprawling minutes, all Clark knew was this shuddering, restrained delight, watching his favorite smug bastard squirm and half-crawl off the bed and, eventually, come and oh _brother_ the music of him _crying out._

***

Clark pretended to fall asleep not long after Bruce, and he pretended to stay asleep when the sunlight finally dove through the windowglass and roundhoused Bruce awake. He acted undisturbed as this stupidly-handsome bittersweet man lurched out of bed. When Bruce crossed the threshold of the bedroom door, though, Kent rolled over onto his back, taking up the space still possessed of Bruce's warmth.

He listened to each footfall and inhalation, concerned he was about to hear Bruce dress and leave for that appointment on Tilton Avenue. But, no, he heard Bruce open the kitchen door (the way the hinges squeaked gave it away), then several cabinets. That sounded less like Wayne was desperate to leave, and more like he wanted a cuppa but was too groggy to brew one himself.

"It's in the green tin on the 'fridge!" he called out.

"Where's the damn percolator?" Two more cabinets, both of them, judging from the sound, the wrong ones.

"It's--never mind, I'll get it," Clark said, smiling up at the ceiling for a few dopey seconds.

Take  _that_ , Luthor.

***

Embarrassing as it was to confess, even in his private thoughts, he only caught on because their sixth encounter took so damned long to occur. They made and broke plans three times, two thanks to Superman-related emergencies, once because of something Bruce described as an emergency involving an old friend. By the time he could get Bruce anywhere near a bedroom, it had been four months since he’d last had the privilege.

He might have rushed it.

He used his mouth on Bruce until the ring of muscle flexed easily around his tongue and Bruce _screamed_ against the back of his own hand; Clark drew back to ask if he could and Bruce said "Yes" before he could finish the sentence. He gambled on the heat of the moment, fetched the Vaseline a little faster than he ought to have been able to, won the bet; pushed Bruce flat on his back and felt shockingly toned legs snap tight around his waist, heard Bruce whisper “Come on, hurry, I can’t--," then heard Bruce say nothing at all as Clark eased him open and rocked into him.

And oh good Lord he throbbed so deep that he must have given Wayne something he hadn't gotten in a while, because instead of speaking, Bruce groaned so low it may have originated from the base of his spine. His voice took on a ragged, husky edge that not even the whisky had created, and _oh was that_ no he ignored the ice-cold spill of fear down his spine and he rocked harder and Bruce cried out again and no _yes that_ can’t be _really was_ \--

Clark stood up sharply. As he pulled on his underwear and his only good slacks, he heard Bruce say "Oh, Jesus Christ, are you getting dressed?"

His undershirt, and he got half the buttons on his shirt done up, when he heard the almost-whispered follow-up: "What did I do?"

He could not reply; the very thought of talking right now spun his brain into a panic so profound that it almost had a physical presence. It sat on his chest, yellow and stifling, so he silently hooked his socks back into their garters and his feet into his shoes.

"If you leave me right now without saying a goddamned word," said Bruce, "don't bother coming back."

He nodded, set his glasses back on, pushed them up his nose and into place.

When Bruce finally gave up and covered his own nakedness with the topsheet, all Clark could think was how he'd seen Batman pull the same trick with his cape.

-tbc-


	3. Chapter 3

Clark's thoughts all eventually boiled down into the tallow of the same impossible sentence: _Oh jeez, I had a fling with_ the Batman _._

He ignored the few attempts Bruce made at contacting him. He didn't think about why Bruce would try to call him after telling him it was over. Nor did he think about whether or not he, Clark Kent, ace reporter and radiation-powered genius, might be incorrect.

Bruce _moved_ like Batman, their strides told of the same injuries endured and overcome--and there was his unbreakable habit of keeping as fully dressed as possible, the occasional parting or slipping of cloth revealing a network of scars so heinous that when Clark first glimpsed them, Bruce muttered "I wasn't popular in boarding school" because he knew Clark would ask--the gaps in his public schedule that fit far too neatly in with his private life, Bruce Wayne off skiing in Colorado while he knew Batman was laid up with a hairline-fractured ankle.

What he didn't know was what the heck he ought to do. He had been so stunned in the moment that he’d adroitly avoided the obvious solution--telling Bruce that he knew; now that he'd the luxury of hindsight, he could even picture how that would have gone.

 _I know who you are,_ he’d have whispered against Bruce's ear, _you're The Night,_ and Bruce would have groaned _You're nuts_ in That Voice, and as Clark's hands dove under Bruce's shoulders and balanced him perfectly as they rose above the bed, Bruce would realize he was flying, laughing like crazy and saying something accidentally romantic, like _I always knew we'd end up this way_ or maybe _I tried to fuck any man in Metropolis_ but _you--what are the odds, huh?_ And then they would--

But it didn't happen like that, did it? He'd walked out. And ignored Bruce trying to call him. He, and oh God was this hard to face but it was the only logical conclusion, he, Clark Kent, had acted like a royal dick.

But hell, it wasn’t that simple! This was the trap Clark had fallen into the moment he knew for certain who Bruce was, the trap that paralyzed him in stupid indecision. Telling Bruce _I know you’re Batman_ was impossible to justify unless he also admitted _and I’m Superman_. In addition to the possibility of Bruce blowing his top in a fit of offended pique for not seeing it first, there was the skin-crawling thought that Clark couldn’t trust Bruce to keep a lid on it. He knew, with certitude, that he would die before divulging Batman’s identity to anybody.

Batman didn’t have his spotless record.

He thought he had it, the right way to break it to him, but when he gave Bruce a bell (a semi-private line for the few friends, and the carnival of glitterati and girlfriends, of Bruce Wayne), he had to try six times over two lunch-breaks to get through. When he did catch Bruce, he was greeted with a terse "Who's this?"

"Heya, uh, it's Clark," he said, grinning at the accordion door of the phone booth as though it were Bruce. "Look, about--"

"Oh, Clark! Good to hear from you! You just reminded me, there's something I forgot to tell you the other night."

"--what’s that?"

Bruce's tone dropped from being as bonhomie as a slap on the back at a cocktail party to something else entirely--a voice like a knife pressed blunt against the small of your back while walking home from a night bussing tables. "Never fucking call me again."

Clark listened to the operator instruct him to hang up twice in a row.

***

"The hell happened, Kent?"

"Eh," he said, shrugging his slumped shoulders, doing a fair job at pretending to be drunk.

They were in the kind of bar Bruce was afraid of being seen in by the press. Lane sometimes came here to people-watch, and sometimes came here to meet sources, and sometimes came here to troll for a partner. Clark sometimes accompanied her, despite the unpleasant fact that Lane was the worst kind of bird-dog--the kind who grins cluelessly and _Who, me?_ s as she walks out the door of the bar with some ambidextrous guy who hitherto had been flirting with Clark. He admired her skill too much to be angry about it.

He liked this place. ( _Bruce is missing out_ , he thought, and _that_ made him prickle inwardly with frustration.) Quiet, no mob presence, no successful police raids in five years. The owner was a stout-hearted old woman with a chronically-sick wife and a rare but pleasant smile. And sometimes he needed a place where he could say, within earshot of the bartender, "I had a good thing going with him. I screwed it up. Pretty sure he hates me now."

"I don't blame him. Just looking at you gets under my skin sometimes." She chewed on the stem of a maraschino cherry, her chin resting on the knuckles of her folded hands, and stared at him. When Clark finally gave his (third) beer a nervous swig, she elaborated. "Your bullshit's giving me hives."

"I know, I know, it's just... I figured out some things about him that I should've left alone."

"So what? You should be doing that more often."

"Not if I want a fellow to call me back," Clark said, biting the words off a little too firmly.

"Calm down." She looked at the tip of the cherry stem as though she wished it were a cigarette. "I'll get this round. Sorry you're single again."

"Sorry I fouled up my ability to write about him for no reason."

"Wasn't for _no_ reason,” she said, giving him that very particular grin, where the force of her goodwill squared off her grin and wrinkled her nose, the one she normally saved for when she talked to her family on the telephone. “You got to sleep with him."

"Come on," he said, finishing his beer. He deliberately picked up her cocktail and drank half of it before she could dope-slap him. "You make me sound fast. And it wasn't just sex."

"Oh, yeah? Then what the hell are you doing here, roundheels?"

"A few things." He tilted his empty glass at the bartender as she walked by. "Hey--! Can I get a Tom Collins?"

The bartender paused, nodded, and vanished through the door behind the bar, the one with _KEEP THE HELL OUT!!_ carved into the cheap wood at eye level.

"All the times we've been here," Lois muttered, "you've ordered that drink four times. And I swear you've never gotten one." She spat out the stem into a napkin.

He grinned, that slightly goofy expression that Lane never quite bought. "I don't drink them. I've got some contacts in the force. Those contacts can't be seen here, or anyplace like this. But they can let me know when and where the cops are planning to raid, and I can pass it along. Why'd you think we met here so early in the evening? They got to make a little money, now they can shut down before the bulls get here."

"Why the fuck didn't anybody tell me about this?"

"Because they all figured you'd write about it."

Clark thought he was pretty clever in distancing himself from the subject of their conversation, until she said: "At least I don't drown myself in avoidance. What could you possibly know about God’s Gift that you can't tell him _or_ the public?"

Then, because he had to lie, he was awful at lying, and it was the first thing that flew out of his mouth, he said: “Forget all that. Did’ja ever listen to that record I loaned you?”

Lane’s mouth tugged into a frown. “Which one. You’ve lent me seven.”

“ _Down to Eartha._ ”

“Eh. I liked _That Bad Eartha_ better.”

“I dug ‘Strangers in the Starlight’.”

She took a moment to recall the lyrics; he could see the shape of some of the words on her lips as she unconsciously mouthed them. “You would. You’re more tenderhearted than anybody I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks,” he said. And meant it.

***

Bruce had made it pretty clear he wanted nothing to do with Clark Kent. But he hadn’t, couldn’t do the same with Superman. Whatever it said about his own lonely frustration, Clark struggled with a rare sense of pure powerlessness; Bruce had said _never again_ and Clark didn’t dare challenge that boundary.

And the longer he kept silent, the easier it got, until he barely sensed its weight.

A month later and they were both called to the scene of the same explosion, and Superman knew the instant he laid eyes on Batman that ( _oh Lord I’m an idiot_ ) he couldn't have been more wrong, that he ought to have ignored his conscience and contacted Batman before now, that the temptation to ignore the proceedings and the audience entirely and blurt out _I know who you are_ came upon him like the Holy Ghost at a Pentecostal service, and it dogged him until the danger had passed.

Then the night began to fade into the barest promise of a morning and Batman, out of years of sharply-honed melodramatic habit, watched the sun tease under the horizon from the statue-lined rooftop of one of Gotham's tallest skyscrapers. And Superman, out of years of trying to get anything out of Batman other than anger and professional coolness, watched alongside him.

"Do you ever wonder if there's a pattern to it?" Batman said. Superman stared as each word puffed out silver from Batman's lips, how they lingered in a misty haze around his masked face, how Batman was going to catch his death if he kept breathing the thin, freezing air unaided. "There's been a lot of alien activity in Gotham over the past six months. Not all of it required the League's attention, but if it keeps apace, I'm not--"

"See, I will gladly talk to you about that later, I swear, I won't forget," said Superman, "but there's something I gotta tell you first. I'm Clark Kent. I figured out who you were and I kinda flipped my lid, and I'm sorry, I know you said you didn't want to t-talk and I get it. I really, uh, never thought about what I'd do if I slept with someone else's private identity, seriously I'm sorry, but listen, we can--..."

Considering what little he had to work with, he read Bruce's facial expressions fine--eyes flickered then darkened as his pupils dilated, a slight tic shivered along his cheek as he ground his teeth, once. Not encouraging, but he kind of deserved it. He wasn't aware that he'd started floating until he noticed that Batman was suddenly five inches shorter than usual.

"You're," said Batman, and Superman kept his mouth shut as his sometimes-ally worked through the implications of his rambling. Then kept his mouth shut as Batman gave him the longest and most speculative glare he'd received since they first fought (against one another, for reasons which made sense at the time and struck Clark as thoughtless now), looking for Clark Kent in Superman's jawline and hairline, and not finding him.

Bruce glanced below the belt so briefly that anyone else might have missed it, blinked, looked again, and despite the cold morning, turned a little red.

"I don't fucking believe this," Batman managed to spit out.

"I know, I should've said--"

"Shut _up_ , Clark," Bruce said, and it wasn't so much the change in his voice, or anything about his posture, which announced the transubstantiation from Batman to Bruce Wayne. It was mostly the eyes, his gaze turned from shrewd and inscrutable to glassy and foolish, and suddenly, Superman beheld Bruce shuddering in a costume. "You should have said before you left. Christ in a Cadillac, it--you have no idea how hard this was for me, meeting you more than once and, God, I let you fuck me! Now I know why it's so goddamn easy for you, at least. Why would _you_ be afraid of being caught?"

He hung his head, convicted, his heels barely hovering above the rooftop. "I'm afraid of what happens if you were ca--"

"Ring-a-ding-ding. You're so compassionate."

"Is there anything I can--"

"What the fuck did I do? That's all I want from you. What was my tell? How did you know it was me?"

Clark doubted that this was the only thing Bruce wanted to know. But more than that, he heard the real fear in Bruce's voice (admittedly, discomforting to hear when he was dressed for work). He understood its source. Hadn’t he asked Bruce how he’d known Clark was homosexual on that very first night? Hadn’t he been momentarily fearful of the prospect that if a flaky ne’er-do-well playboy saw through him, _everybody_ could?

He bit his lip, his face took on a distinctly insuperhuman expression of embarrassment. "You sounded exactly like Batman when I, uh, finally, that is, um, when I finally hit your prostate."

"Oh, Holy Mary," he said, both his hands cupping over his mouth. A thick spume of frozen breath leaked from between his fingers, his brown eyes narrowed, and Clark realized that Bruce was struggling between shrieking or laughing. "Guess I'm never letting anybody fuck me again."

"Don't talk like that. You're good at it."

"I can't get caught out."

Clark gave this a few microseconds' worth of thought. This almost pathological dread of the truth being revealed, that was Bruce's entire, sad, vapid life. Half the lies were snaking spirals of self-deception. While Clark knew all about the legal and political implications of his sexual preferences, it didn't give him half the nihilistic angst it did Bruce, who was just as terrified of the fact that he needed a lover as he was of anybody else knowing it.

“I know,” he said.

“Bullshit. You’ve got no idea. Not like they can scare you with prison.”

 _Dammit, would you just shut up for one--_ But he didn’t dare to finish the thought, much less say it out loud. Even a mild curse from his lips tended to intimidate people who knew of his powers, so he didn’t swear. And even a gentle expression of anger was automatically frightening when it came from him, so he didn’t show it.

Was he terrorizing Bruce right now?

“I’m really sorry,” Clark mumbled, and there was something so Kentishly shy in his delivery that he might as well have slipped on the specs. “You deserved to know the truth. Sorry I ripped off the Band-aid like that. Do you just, uh, d’you want me to go? I can go.”

Bruce gazed up at him--oh, he was floating again. He forced himself to touch down on the rooftop; the instant his soles met the concrete, Bruce said, “I’ve got to be at work in four hours, so--”

“Okay, swell. I’m flying you home.”

“The hell you are.”

“Listen, buster, you’re not safe to drive, and--”

“‘ _Buster_ ’?”

“--and I still care about you, and whether or not you make it home in one piece. I can leave or I can fly you home, Bruce, but you are going to tell me which one you want.”

“Like I don’t have goddamn autopilot.” His lips, white from the cold, curved into a slight smile. “F-fine. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about any of this. I don’t want you leaving until I figure it out.”

***

Clark knew how to wait--maybe better than Bruce counted on. He waited until the next night, until Bruce had belled him and told him he was home from his night job; after Clark slipped into Bruce’s bedroom from the window (he’d always wanted to do that for a lover, and had never gotten the chance before). Bruce was still mostly in uniform, and tired enough to let Clark help him out of it (something else he’d always wanted to do for Batman) without trying to cover up his nakedness.

The fulfillment of two fantasies in short order _almost_ brought Clark to some blank incoherence, but he was _just_ stubborn enough to keep his eyes on the prize. He waited as he’d gotten Bruce naked and he’d worked Bruce into a shivering anticipation with a couple of lubricated fingers. And, somehow, he waited until after he’d laid Bruce out before him on that plush king-sized mattress and pushed into him as quickly and deeply as Bruce would let him.

Then Clark leaned down, his lips touched the crown of Bruce’s head, then the edge of his ear. “Say,” he said. “Did you, uh, did you figure it out?”

“--what--?”

“H-how you feel,” he breathed, “about this. About me.” He punctuated each fragment with a shallow, thoughtless little thrust. “‘Cause I know how I feel. I said. But you _won’t_ , y’know, I could live with a lot if you were straight with me about, about, the, _how_ \--”

Bruce might have escaped all responsibility for answering him--Clark lacked the brains to finish his own thoughts right now, much less demand anyone else’s. Surely he knew that, he could bite his lip and let it go. Instead Bruce rocked back with a cold, steady roll until his hips stammered in surprise against Clark’s; he groaned, the sound of it ground to death between his teeth; then he spoke, his husky voice almost even and emotionless: “--feel pretty fuckin’ _good_ right now, Clark, ‘bout you _and_ this and seeing you tomorrow night _and_ \--”

"Don’t say that,” Clark said, “sounds like a promise.”

“Yeah,” he stammered, “it does, it _is_ , I--” and he didn’t say much else after that, but that was fine. Clark would have been a terrible listener.

He could always ask him about it another night.

-end-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a reason this ending seems open to potential continuation in subsequent stories.

**Author's Note:**

> The Three Kings brought this fic for my fabulous partner in writing, crime, and life, Flea (DoubtingRabbit here, shoujocowboy on Tumblr). Merry holidays, my love.


End file.
